I haven’t written that much this year, having concentrated more on my art. Looking around at other people’s lists, I can only conclude it has not been a vintage year for art – anywhere. There has to be fallow years obviously, where everyone catches their breath, takes stock and allows new things to develop. Sometimes the critic has to be patient. Most of these posts also appeared on my other blog, where their hit counts were deliberately blocked or filtered out of search engines. This was the first year I’d really noticed that. It’s not the work of an individual directly of course, it’s a scanning programme run ostensibly for advertising. Even when I hit-bombed certain posts or pages from different systems, times and places, they would never register any hits. Blogger or Blogspot generates its ‘hit stats’ in other ways, to enhance its advertising revenue, to remain ‘reader friendly’ or web compliant. In other words it plays politics when it’s good for business. At least when I post on WWR there is no pretence to ready circulation. Its hit counts are just as ‘statistical’ but very occasionally you do get feedback.

Facebook helped with that. Dropping the URL to Zombie Formalism for instance, into a thread by Kenny Schachter saw the hits on my other blog soar. Some hits on some posts do count apparently. Others remained frozen out, like the review of Obrist’s Ways of Curating. I consider this my best review, an overdue demolition of one of the art world’s prime creeps. Although lengthy, attention to text and careful research expose his pretension, nepotism and ignorance. Obrist exemplifies everything that is wrong with the art world. Similar posts on other art world idols like Alistair Hicks and Glenn Lowry suffered similar fates.